Issue #4579 has been updated by Akira Tanaka.
I think securerandom_opensslfree.diff is too radical for this issue.
It may decrease working platforms.
However concrete advantage/disadvantage between OpenSSL and /dev/urandom is interesting.
(portability, randomness quality, performance, ...)
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Bug #4579: SecureRandom + OpenSSL may repeat with fork
http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/4579
Author: Eric Wong
Status: Assigned
Priority: Normal
Assignee: Akira Tanaka
Category: lib
Target version: 1.9.x
ruby -v: -
=begin
This could arguably be a bug in OpenSSL or the openssl extension, but
I think it's easier to fix in Ruby right now.
The PRNG in OpenSSL uses the PID to seed the PRNG. Since PIDs get
recycled over time on Unix systems, this means independent processes
over a long time span will repeat random byte sequences. This has
security implications, but fortunately very little software forks
very frequently. I am not a security expert.
I am using OpenSSL 0.9.8g-15+lenny11 (Debian Lenny)
Attached is a script that reproduces the issue (takes a while to run).
It'll output two identical lines to illustrate the issue.
=end
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